Jesse Kline: A penny for your thoughts? It could cost you $1,200

A penny for your thoughts? It could cost you $1,200

The Canadian penny may be going the way of the Dodo bird, but that hasn’t stopped the Royal Canadian Mint from trying to make a mint off the design.

The Mint recently issued a warning to Halifax-based folk music singer Dave Gunning — whose upcoming album depicts pennies on both the front and back cover — that he has violated the government’s copyright on the currency. Most of us have probably never thought of inspecting our money in great detail, but Canadian bills do indeed contain a copyright notice in the lower right corner, and coins are covered under the same provisions.

The album, entitled No More Pennies, includes lyrics about the coin and features a man sitting in a coffee shop with a bunch of pennies strewn across the counter on its front cover. On the back is a picture of a giant penny falling below the horizon like a sunset.

The Mint says it will not charge Mr. Gunning a fee for the first 2,000 albums he produces, but will levy a charge of $1,200 for the next 2,000 copies — a cost this struggling artist says he cannot afford. According to one government bureaucrat, however, the Mint is helping “this guy out by giving him a break.” How nice of them, especially considering Ottawa is in the process of withdrawing the penny from circulation, which means it will soon disappear in any case.

It’s one thing to try and protect the currency from counterfeiting, but that is not what we’re talking about here. No one is going to cut the pennies off the album cover and trying to pass them off as the real thing. The government is simply trying to get a cut of the action by demanding royalties — a process that is generally referred to as taxation.

“It is pennies to them but is pretty substantial for me,” said Mr. Gunning, who has launched a “Penny Drive” to try and raise the money to pay this unexpected tax. Of course, if the Mint is going to enforce its copyright against a prominent, but still small-time, musician, it raises questions about how far it is willing to go: Will every Canadian TV show or movie in which currency is exchanged on screen be held in violation of copyright laws?

The Canadian dollar is not the only major currency protected by copyright — the British Pound and the Euro also feature copyright notices. But the idea that the government can own the copyright on its works is a concept that’s completely foreign to Americans and citizens of many other countries.

Under this country’s Copyright Act, all government works “belong to Her Majesty” and remain copyrighted “for a period of fifty years following the end of that calendar year.” This is known as “Crown Copyright,” which is different from how public works are handled in countries such as the United States, where government documents are automatically put into the public domain.

Conceivably, Mr. Gunning could change the album to include pennies that are more than 50 years old, and thus not covered under copyright law. But anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that this policy is — well, loonie.

Copyright law is supposed to protect individuals and companies who invest time and money in producing artistic, or other forms on intellectual works. It does so by granting the creator a monopoly on the sale of that work for a specified period of time. But the government is not in the business of making money off what it produces. It is funded by, and supposed to be working in the name of, artists like Mr. Gunning and every other taxpaying Canadian citizen.

More than an issue of government bureaucrats refusing the bend the rules, this case highlights one of the many problems with Crown Copyright. Namely, that our currency is a symbol of, and should belong to, the people of Canada, not the government.

A penny for your thoughts? Never mind, it could cost you more than you bargained for.